X banned in Brazil

A judge in Brazil has ordered the suspension of platform X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk failed to appoint a new legal representative for the country.

Brazil's top judge, Alexandre de Moraes, ordered the national telecommunications agency (Anatel) to restrict access to the X platform within 24 hours, and gave Apple and Google five days to remove X from their mobile app stores. Users who access the platform through VPNs face a fine of US$8,900.

In early August, Musk shut down X's offices in Brazil after de Moraes threatened to arrest the company's legal representative for disobeying "censorship orders." Last week, however, the judge fulfilled his promise and ordered the blocking of the platform.

"Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy, and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes," Musk wrote in a statement to X after the decision. Musk and de Moraes have been at loggerheads for months. Brazilian justice launched an investigation into Company X in April after Musk said he had reactivated accounts that Company X had to block for spreading disinformation. As The New York Times reported, many of the accounts that de Moraes ordered Xu to block were linked to supporters of right-wing former president Jair Bolsonaro.

“We are in no way insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States,” Company X wrote in a post Thursday night from its Global Government Affairs account. “The fundamental issue at stake is that Judge de Moraes requires us to violate Brazilian laws. We just won't do it.”

Brazil requires major platforms to have a legal representative in the country. In the past, it also briefly banned other major social platforms, including Telegram and WhatsApp.

Judge de Moraes also took issue with Starlink, another company owned by Musk, which had its finances frozen on the basis that Starlink was responsible for the fines imposed on Company X.

After the blockade, Brazilian users took refuge on the Mastodon and Bluesky platforms, which also expect downtime due to the influx of new users. Bluesky works similar to X, but it is a decentralized platform. Within 48 hours, they got as many as 500,000 new users. In Mastodon, over 3,500 new Brazilian users are registered on a daily basis, while before that there were 0.